The Rays announced today that they have designated Erik Bedard for assignment to make room for the return of Joel Peralta, who was on the DL for the first time since 2004. Tests revealed Peralta had the chikungunya virus…There is also word from the Trop that Ryan Hanigan will begin a rehab assignment on Wednesday with Charlotte and could be activated on Friday.

My brain also says I could look this up in less time than it takes to post this.... so I did. According to Wikipedia:

"CHIKV is transmitted similarly to dengue fever and causes an illness with an acute febrile phase lasting two to five days, followed by a longer period of joint pains in the extremities; this pain may persist for years in some cases."

As we all know, Wikipedia is infallible, so now I'm no longer worried about a MRSA-like outbreak... rather, I'm worrying that Peralta is going to have trouble gripping the baseball...

Bedard was a bad pick-up.
I will eat a little portion of crow, because I stated several times that I thought he would be a nice addition...
I guess even I have to be wrong at least once... so much for my perfect game.

LOL, there's been a lot of that going around Mr. Smith...I threw my hat in the ring on the Heath Bell trade...at least you made it until July. BTW, I contracted Dengue during a post-Hugo work assignment in St. Croix. If chikungunya is similar then Peralta's days indeed could be numbered. The relapses are numerous and quite debilitating.

Bedard had 3 horrible starts, 8 good ones and 4 middling efforts. Rays were 7-8 in his starts, which is basically the season-long team record (compare that to Roberto Hernandez, whose w-l was way out of line with the team).

More importantly, when the whole rotation was down, he gave them a couple of decent May starts. I think he gave them what he had, and a few times Maddon left him out there to suffer in order to save the bullpen (one game in Toronto sticks in my head) and that skewed his stats a bit. I've got no beef with Bedard, he was cheap and gave the rotation time to get healthy.

He wasn't horrible by any means, but he averaged a smidgen under 5 innings per outing, and that is what was stressing the 'pen, which was essentially the fissure that created a lot of the losses in the first half (trust me, I know he wasn't the only starter responsible for short outings this season).

great assessment. i agree 100%. we all knew if Hellboy came back healthy, and the rest of the staff stayed off the DL, that EB woudl be the odd man out. everything worked out as expected. EB deserves a pat on the back, and hopefully he can catch on with a team once rosters expand.